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Margaret Brouwer
Biography
Margaret Brouwer is a composer whose rich imagination and flair for musical construction have resulted in a solid and growing body of composition that have marked her as one of the most notable composers to come to prominence in the 1990's.
Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on February 8, 1940, Margaret Brouwer received her B.M. from Oberlin College and her D.M.A. from Indiana University. Although Brouwer started out as a professional violinist, it is as a composer that she has made her greatest impact. Her compositional teachers have included Donald Erb, Harvey Sollberger and Frederick Fox, as well as George Crumb with whom she studied at the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival. She is currently Head of the Compositional Department of the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she holds the Vincent K. and Edith H. Smith chair in composition. Before that, she served as Composer-in-Residence with the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra in Virginia and taught composition at Washington and Lee University. While at Washington and Lee, she was the founding Director of Sonoklect, the University's new music series and festival. Her music has been hailed in the New York Times, to wit: "…Skyriding…made no obvious concessions toward the styles of the day and inhabited its own peculiarly bewitching harmonic world. The first movement…achieved a marvelous mercurial lyric flow." The Roanoke Times described Remembrances for Orchestra as "…lyrical, accessible, powerful and deeply moving." Brouwer has been performed by such groups as the St. Louis, Juilliard and Roanoke Symphony Orchestras, Bay Area Women's Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Dale Warland Singers, 20th Century Consort, Chestnut Brass Company, and Cassatt String Quartet, among others. Her music is published exclusively by Carl Fischer/Pembroke Music and is recorded on the Crystal, Centaur, and Opus One labels. The Seattle Symphony with Gerard Schwartz, conductor, and Richard Stoltzman, soloist, has recorded her Clarinet Concerto for release on the MMC label. She has held residencies at Bellagio, the Charles Ives Center for American Music, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, as well as being resident composer at the Bennington Chamber Music Festival and at the International Conference of Women Composers in Brazil. Her prizes and awards include an NEA grant, the Lee Ettleson (Opus One) Award, the Carmichael Competition Award and the Virginia Council of Higher Education's Outstanding Faculty in Virginia Award. Her most recent commissions include: Demeter Prelude, premiered by the Audubon String Quartet in June, and under grants by the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a new orchestral piece, Symphony No. 1 (Lake Voices), commissioned by the Akron Symphony as part of a three-orchestra consortium commission and first performed by them on October 25, 1997. Recent performances of Brouwer's works also include Skyriding (Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center), Clarinet Concerto (Richard Stoltzman and the Roanoke Symphony), Crosswinds (Cassatt and Da Vinci String Quartets), Diary of an Alien (Continuum), Chamber Concerto (Dinosaur Annex), and the premieres of both Pluto and Remembrances by the Roanoke Symphony. |